About

Teaching about the past can make your brain hurt! Learning history can make students’ brains hurt! We are all looking for ways to help our students to get better at history and to enjoy the subject we love. Onebighistorydepartment (OBHD) has been created by the members of the Secondary Committee of the Historical Association (you can see a list of current members here: Secondary Committee members – June 2019).

OBHD is intended to be a place for sharing thinking, resources and conversations about teaching and learning history. We want it to share tried and tested teaching strategies and resources that help students learn. We also want the blog to make more colleagues aware of the years of discussion to develop knowledge and expertise about high quality history teaching. We all need great ideas when under pressure to plan lessons. However, really good history teachers are also immersed in lengthy discussions about students’ progression in history, they have a strong sense of the purpose of what they are doing and of how it fits into a bigger picture.

That means that, while each post here is short and offers a solution to a specific learning block in history classrooms in the form of strategies or resources, each solution is also connected to a wider ongoing discussion about how to teach history. We hope you will want to join in and become a more active part of the history teaching community by joining the Historical Association. If you want to look at the website of the Historical Association you can find it atwww.history.org.uk and you can follow the HA on Twitter @histassoc.